Bøker av C S Hughes

The poems in Sound Never Dies & Other Poems all invoke sound in one way or another; from the impossible to reproduce rill of an Australian magpie's morning song in One For Sorrow, to the ancient hammer blows Marconi never hoped he one day might hear of the title poem; from the strained, pleading vernacular of a miracle's unlikely testimonials in Petals, to a statue's almost imperceptible exhalations in Vainglory Morning. Here you will find the sombre rattle of trains, the death songs of whales, the clank of last night's dishes, and the ricochet thunder of a child's toy drum. Here, although the voice may haltand tremble, although the words may shy and still, nevertheless, the sound, the sound, the sound, in its resonances and reverberations, goes on.

In his sometimes arch and overwrought language, poet C S Hughes presents a collection of his reveries, myths, wanderings and fables, in which; a young woman listens to the advice of cats, but ignores the remonstrance of birds; the young people of the Dog Clan, guided by their ancient Mother, defy and surrender to the burgeoning winter; at a funeral, by a carnival, two old soldiers defy their fears, and their strings; on a lost Antarctic shore the Gods approve as an expedition halts for a final game of cricket; by an intemperate sea a fisher-wife cares for a very strange foundling; in a city of sparkling glass washing windows is the loneliest job of all; this and much more you will find, if you surrender reason to The Book Of Fables.

Caesar Seetham, former financial consultant and erstwhile poet, is reported by his mercurial wife Sybil for breaching home quarantine, as a new, mutated strain of coronavirus sweeps the world. To her chagrin, she finds herself confined with him in the close quarters of The Sceptred Crown - a third rate corona hotel. While chaos reigns in the outside world, strange new symptoms emerge. Those infected with COVID-22 show few symptoms at first, except a tendency to gibber and babble in a kind of deranged and semi-poetic aphasia, before rapidly succumbing to silence, coma, haemorrhage and death. While Caesar records his impressions of a world gone mad, Dr Mowbray, in charge at the Sceptred Crown, learns that a unique antibody in Caesar's blood could prevent the progress of the disease, leaving the infected, like Caesar, although trapped in a state of poetic aphasia, at least not declining into coma and death. For the process to succeed, Caesar must not only calmly and willingly give up his blood, but he must submit to having every drop drained, also giving up his life - the only way Mowbray will be able to extract enough antibodies to create a viable serum.While Caesar considers what his life is worth, Sybil is struck by even more disturbing symptoms, and if he can't even save the woman he loves, why the hell should he bother saving the world?

An uproarious poem about an untypical Australian Christmas.

The Book Of Whimsies is a collection of gossamer thin poems in which you will find summer days and winter nights, dragonflies and storm borne kites, buttered scones and rusting tin, lost ships and weary hearts, green hills and untied shoes, cups of tea and sleepless nights, and floating above a benign and melancholy moon. The poems are whimsical, light, mysterious as whispers, sometimes sad, sometimes high, but nearly always told with the poignancy of loss, the echoes of love, and with the knowledge that a whim may just as easily lead to dark and unexpected consequences.